Group 24 Flooded to Group 31 AGM

BFL13 wrote:
There is no wiring change needed as noted above.

The only thing is the one 24 they supply will be wasted money when you go for two 6s or two 27s later, so the saving for you should be for them to keep their single 24 and reduce your cost, and you supply your own batts, or they supply the batts you want and give you the cost of that one 24 off the price of the other batts.

Yep, I tried that. They wouldn't go for it.

Makes a lot of sense, right? But nope.

Sandia Man wrote:
Wow, what a rip off, first they added warranty to your OTD price, and now what amounts to a few bucks of wiring they want $250. We are from the PHX area, which dealer are you purchasing your TH at so I can tell family and friends to beware. I asked our dealer when we purchased our TH what it would cost to beef up our battery bank, he stated first battery is included, only additional expense would be actual cost of extra batteries, no fake labor or wiring charges. I just asked for giggles anyway, we put a couple of 6 volt golfcart batteries from Samsclub since we mostly boondock and they are much hardier for that type of off grid RVing. Have lots of great times in your new TH!!!

I don't necessarily want to slander them in public; especially this forum. But if you want to PM me I will be happy to share the details.

I felt like I got a fair deal on the price, sans the extended warranty they slipped in, which we will deal with tomorrow and refuse all that before signing. It wasn't what I would consider a bargain basement price, but fair, and they beat some of the other larger dealers in the valley by quite a large margin. Especially considering how hot the market is right now. I guess the timing on the 21 models was just about right with the 22's coming out. Perhaps we could have gotten them down farther by waiting a bit longer while it continued to take up lot space, but we were ready now.

On the other hand, the parts department is nowhere near a good deal it seems, so I'll just do it myself. Not a big deal if it's just wiring 2 batteries together in series. It's just a bummer we'll end up wasting the batteries it comes with. But I guess we can see if they'll omit them completely and reduce the price a tad.

Anyway, assuming they honor their agreed price and don't try to force us into things we don't want, I'd say the experience hasn't been bad overall. I'm just not willing to waste $250 on what probably only amounts to about a 30 minute job, if that.

By the way. You don't wire the batteries in series. If you do that you will burn out everything 12v in the RV because you will be supplying it with 24v. If the "dealer" is going to wire them in series for $250 run fast and find a new dealer.

ApexAZ wrote:
They said part of the $250 labor is to upgrade the wiring to a heavier gauge wire to support the bigger batteries. What I'm a bit unclear on is whether this is just the wires needed to connect them in series, or will the wires that lead to the panel also need to be upgraded?

They are trying to make more money off you.

NOTHING ON THE WIRING NEEDS UPGRADED when increasing the size of the batteries.

ApexAZ wrote:
Can anyone recommend a good AGM battery, or are they all similar?

DEKA!

I put DEKA 31s in my truck camper

One thing worth noting though is that all the towable RVs I've seen, the battery rack up front is made to fit a pair of group 24 battery boxes. Bigger battery boxes rarely fit unless the rack gets re-built

I believe swapping 2 cheap group 24 FLAs for 2 group 31 AGMs and making them fit would be worth $250 to me. Their explanation for the additional charge seems fishy though.

KD4UPL wrote:
By the way. You don't wire the batteries in series. If you do that you will burn out everything 12v in the RV because you will be supplying it with 24v. If the "dealer" is going to wire them in series for $250 run fast and find a new dealer.

Ah I'm sorry, you're right. I mean parallel.

2112 wrote:
I believe swapping 2 cheap group 24 FLAs for 2 group 31 AGMs and making them fit would be worth $250 to me. Their explanation for the additional charge seems fishy though.

That's $250 just in labor. All said it was close to $800 total and that was just for regular flooded, not even AGM. They said to do AGM it would have been even more.

But mostly I was just curious about the labor fees. Seemed high.

I misinterpreted your original post. I thought the whole upgrade was $250.

All said it was close to $800 total and that was just for regular flooded, not even AGM.

That's crazy